


Looking For The Unexpected

by AlmostLeia



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Light Bondage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:06:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlmostLeia/pseuds/AlmostLeia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Penelope Garcia would go to her grave swearing it wasn't her fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking For The Unexpected

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so. It turns out there’s a guy who does BDSM porn called "Spencer Reed". I blame this story on the fact [dotfic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dotfic) agreed with me about that being hilarious (then beta‘d the everloving crap out of this), and also on [this picture](http://i42.tinypic.com/91fjfa.jpg) of Matthew Gray Gubler.
> 
> Originally published on LJ 1/18/10

Penelope Garcia would go to her grave swearing it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t! She didn’t tell Sara to buy her that 6 month pass to Boyland.com for Chrismukkah (even if it was in revenge for her _occasional_  rhapsodizing about the wonder that is Derek Morgan on a tight t-shirt day.)  
  
Still, what was the point of having access to a lot of lovely men and never using it? Garcia had logged on a few times, sticking to the more vanilla areas. Since endless rounds of Minesweeper had already lost their charm for the night she decided to browse a bit. The site had a ‘Featured Model’ on the front page that changed every few days; there was something appealing and sort of familiar, somehow, about the current one, even if he was listed in the ‘fetish’ section.  
  
Deciding that whatever she ended up looking at couldn’t be worse than anything she saw as part of her job, Garcia clicked on the link to his gallery, and oh, wow. The kid (because he couldn’t be more than 20, which made her feel kind of like a cougar, but whatever, no shame in her game, as Morgan liked to say) was flat-out gorgeous, skinnier than her usual tastes but pale and smooth, all long lean torso and legs for miles. He tended to be shot from behind or posed looking down or to the side, obviously straightened hair partially obscuring his face, just enough visible to glimpse a strong nose and a seriously glorious pair of lips that made Garcia think of several vulgar expressions she promptly squashed back into her subconscious. The photos were thankfully tame enough to keep her from reaching for the back button, arty shots with bound delicate wrists or slim arms cuffed below prominent shoulder blades, between narrow hipbones. They were coy, and in the earliest of that series his nervousness and insecurity were clear in every line of his body. The gradual confidence displayed was compelling.  
  
Garcia was considering a little right-click-save-as action for several of them when the last shot, one of the model from the waist up finally facing towards the camera, loaded. And her mind suddenly bluescreened. It wasn’t…couldn’t be…oh, no way. The odds against Spencer Reid 1) being a fetish model 2) appearing on a site she happened to be a member of and 3) her geeky little lamb Reid! In naughty photos! Seriously! were astronomical. Clearly this was some sort of hallucination brought on by lack of sleep, or something.  
  
“Eviler twin,” she blurted out, then started laughing at herself. Garcia shut down the computer and headed for bed, hoping she’d have forgotten all about this in the morning.  
  


~*~

  
Instead, the next day found Garcia wondering who exactly she’d pissed off enough make them want to punish her like this. Not only did the photos remain fresh and distinct in her mind, but Reid had come dashing in about ten seconds after she’d arrived to request the digital images related to their last case and had stayed to ask her to enter terms into her search engine that she had begun to suspect he was choosing for his own amusement.  
  
“If you’re bored and wanted some company you could just say so, sweetie,” she finally said after the twelfth vague word suggestion.  
  
Reid pulled away from where he’d been leaning on the back of her chair. Garcia turned her head to watch as, as usual, it took him a moment to process that she wasn’t telling him to leave and relax again. She waved her hand in the general direction of everything else in her office he could possibly want to sit on because the chair-leaning had never stopped being annoying, especially since it meant ending up with a crick in her neck if she wanted to look at him while they were talking.  
  
Today was apparently a ‘prop himself against the desk’ day. Garcia didn’t often regret not having the same profiling skills as her coworkers, but sometimes she suspected they’d all be a lot easier to understand if she read body language as well as they did. She spun her chair around to watch as he scooted backwards a little, and there was something about his posture, the way his forearms looked below his rolled up sleeves… The sense of crushing recognition from the night before washed over Garcia. Her eyes widened and she let out a small gasp before she could help it.  
  
“What? What did I do? I didn’t touch anything I’m not supposed to,” Reid said in alarm. “Are you okay? Do you want me to get someone?”  
  
“It’s not you, I’m fine,” Garcia said. She spent several seconds on an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the person currently in front of her with the one from the photos, her internal monologue being reduced to a repetition of the word ‘sweatervest’ and some pained wibbling noises. Lord only knew what the poor boy thought was wrong with her, so she made an effort to smile.  
  
He’d stopped looking around, obviously puzzled, when her expression changed, and instead he looked down at himself. Garcia would never in a million years be able to understand how he’d done it, but his face showed how quickly he’d realized what she was thinking about.  
  
“You didn’t,” he said, sounding equal parts hopeful, embarrassed, and resigned.  
  
“I hate profilers,” she muttered, a familiar refrain, before saying, more loudly, “If you mean the pictures? Of you? Yes, I saw them.”  
  
He pushed off from the desk edge and started to pace, hands waving. “Did you go looking for them? They’re not any of your business, not yours or anybody else‘s. They aren’t related to what we do in any way.”  
  
“A friend gave me a membership to a site they’re posted on. I found them by accident.” she offered. Hopefully he’d find that reassuring.  
  
It didn’t seem to help. He looked even more confused and betrayed. “You used the plural. So you‘ve seen, what, all of them? Why would you do that?”  
  
Garcia felt awful, like she‘d accidentally kicked something small and fuzzy. "I’m sorry, I’m sorry! But in my defense it’s not like I had any reason to think it was you, considering the part where you’re  _naked on the internet_!"  
  
"Whoa now, who's naked on the internet?" Morgan asked, entering the room without knocking and quirking an eyebrow suggestively.  
  
Reid blushed. "A surprising number of people, actually. The innovations in camera technology and the increasing visibility of amateur pornography sites account for most of it, giving rise to phenomena like underage ‘sexting’ -- he twitched his index fingers slightly, as though his mental quotation marks around the term were somehow not obvious from his tone -- “and leading to problems with…”  
  
“Okay!” Morgan cheerfully interrupted. “I was just checking that this foxy lady here hadn’t installed cameras in the locker room,” he added with a grin.  
  
Garcia smiled. “Oh, sugar, you think if I had pictures I’d be sharing them with the undeserving denizens of the web? You want to take it off for me, they’d be for my eyes only. Cross my heart.” She accompanied this by drawing an X across her chest with a finger.  
  
“Did you come here for a reason?” Reid asked Morgan, his voice sharp.  
  
Morgan looked a little confused by the moodiness. “Yeah, Hotch is looking for you, something about printouts?”  
  
“You could have just called me, you know,” Reid said, still sounding annoyed.  
  
“And miss out on visiting the temple of ultimate hotness? Not a chance.” He smiled again at Garcia, then headed for the door.  
  
Even her usual ' _hate to see you go, love to watch you leave_ ' game with Morgan couldn’t distract Garcia from the nasty look Reid shot at her on his way out. She had to do  _something_ , and fast.  
  


~*~

  
Much as she loved her teammates, Garcia could admit that they were collectively not the most socially adept of people. Her choices for who to ask for help resolving this odd situation were therefore limited to JJ. (She had considered and decided against Hotch, on the grounds that it would probably end in one or both of them committing suicide out of sheer embarrassment.)  
  
“If you know something about somebody that they didn’t want you to know, and now they know you know, what would you do?” she asked, the words all in a rush as she barged into JJ’s office.  
  
JJ set aside the papers she’d been reading, and gave Garcia an indulgent look. “I think it’d depend on what I knew, and how I knew it.”  
  
Garcia thought about how to explain without offering any details. “Something totally unexpected but not exactly bad, and completely unintentionally.”  
  
“Then I’d tell them that, and hope they’d forgive me.” JJ said.  
  
“That’s it? You don’t have any other words of finessing wisdom for me?” Garcia asked.  
  
“Reid usually won’t turn down snackfood, but sometimes he thinks that means we’re trying to feed him up and it makes him sulk worse,” JJ offered with a small ' _what can you do_ ' shrug.  
  
“Wait, I didn’t say who it was!”  
  
“Prentiss already called me to ask what was up with him today. It doesn’t take a profiler to put this one together.” JJ tapped the edge of her bundle of papers on her desk, neatening the pile. “Go apologize, and leave me alone to  _not_  speculate about what you found out.”  
  


~*~

  
Garcia ended up fretting about it until lunchtime, since everyone else had ended up in some kind of meeting. She practically ran over to Reid’s desk as soon as he’d gotten back.  
  
“Hey, sweetie, want to go for Indian? I’m buying,” she said, striving for casual.  
  
He shook his head and started rummaging through his bag, clearly intent on ignoring her.  
  
“C‘mon, don‘t shut me out,” she said. She’d maybe been hoping he’d be a little more over it by now. “At least talk to me? You can even pick up where you left off with the name-calling, if you want.”  
  
Reid looked up. “I didn’t call you any names and I don’t want to talk about it.”  
  
It was a start. “Okay, but how ‘bout we talk about how mad at me you are right now? Because I don’t want you to be mad at me. It’s like making kittens cry.”  
  
He blinked several times in succession. “Actually, kittens are physiologically incapable of producing tears in the same way as humans and I’m entirely capable of staying angry, so your simile is flawed.”  
  
It was never a good sign when he went all Spock-y. “Can you at least give me a guess when you’ll stop being mad? I really am sorry, I never would have done it on purpose.”  
  
“At the moment I’d say sometime between now and the heat death of the universe,” he said, gathering up his things to go out.  
  
She scurried after him. “It’s not a big deal, I won’t tell anyone…”  
  
“Stop, just stop,” he cut her off, “I’ve been humiliated enough for one day, are you deliberately making it worse? Just pretend it never happened.” As an afterthought, he added a “Please.”  
  
“I didn’t mean to,” she said, a little defensively. “I’m sorry, I won’t bring it up again. You’re okay, right?”  
  
“I’m..,” he gestured expansively. “Feeling a little stupid for not realizing they were still out there, but it’s not  _the_  most embarrassing moment of my life. It isn’t your fault I had questionable decision-making skills when I was younger. I’ll get over you knowing exactly how poor they were eventually.”  
  
“Honey, it really isn’t that bad. I’m not going to judge you for it or anything,” she reassured him while he poked at the elevator button with deadly force.  
  
“Our girl‘s clearly too forgiving,” Morgan said, throwing his arms over both of their shoulders. “Because I’m sorry, my man, I’m gonna keep judging you a little on the Star Trek thing. I’ll give you that the new movie was cool, but it’s still too much of a geek cliché. You’re better than that.”  
  
“It was ahead of its time in terms of both science fiction and racial equality on television!” Reid squawked.  
  
The elevator finally opened. Reid and Morgan headed off, and Garcia could still hear their companionable bickering even after the doors had closed.  
  


~*~

  
Garcia tried not to think about it. Oh, how she tried. But even the middle of all the busywork she tended to put off, theories kept popping into her mind. Finally she decided to just bite the bullet and confront the question head on.  
  
Thankfully, Reid was still around. She’d always thought it was adorable how he stayed on paperwork nights, even when he’d breezed through his own hours ago. Garcia hovered none too subtly around the bullpen until he got up to re-file a folder on the shelves along the wall, then made her approach.  
  
Looking around to make sure no one was in earshot, she said, “You’re my friend and I respect your right to privacy, but this is going to bug me forever if I don’t ask and you’ve seen what happens when I try to keep things to myself, so here I am. Asking. The way you were talking before; you weren‘t coerced or anything?”  
  
He sighed out a breath. “I got caught counting cards at The Palms when I was nineteen. If any other pit bosses started to suspect me they’d compare notes, I could have been blacklisted, and private hospitals cost a lot, I didn’t want to start using the savings account that Bennington pulls from for my living expenses. One of my former TAs modeled for Suicide Girls,” he said with a small frown of displeasure at the site's name, “she introduced me to Scott, he paid enough to cover them until it was safe to go back to the casinos, and I never had to think about it again. Until now, obviously.”   
  
There were clearly large chunks of the story missing, but Garcia was genuinely surprised he’d told her that much, given how closely Reid guarded his secrets. She wasn’t sure what was showing on her face, though whatever it was seemed to make Reid anxious.   
  
“I didn’t…It wasn’t…” he pursed his lips then started again. “It’s not worth pitying me over. Nothing happened I wasn’t okay with, I just don’t want to analyze why anyone would  _want_  to look at me too closely.” Reid shrugged, looking at the floor, cheeks faintly pink.  
  
“Who wouldn’t want to look at you, pretty boy?” Morgan asked, coming up behind them with an empty mug in his hand. Reid startled and turned even redder.  
  
“Jeezy Creezy, are we going to have to put a bell on you?” Garcia asked. She had never thought of Morgan as particularly stealthy before today. Then she tilted her head consideringly. “Because that might look kind of sexy.”   
  
“No, no, no, there’s only room for one sex kitten in this relationship, and we all know that’s you,” Morgan replied, giving her an exaggerated once over as he passed by to get at the coffee machines.  
  
Reid looked thoughtful. “If you do decide he needs one, Scott would probably let me use my employee discount,” he hesitantly offered.  
  
“Spencer Reid!” Garcia said, faux-shocked and delighted. “And I thought I was the only one around here with that kind of disreputable acquaintances.”  
  
“Apparently I’m full of surprises,” he said, pleased smirk playing at the corners of his mouth.  
  
“I don’t know, I think you’re pretty low on surprises after this one." She set an affectionate hand on his arm.  
  
“Are you two  _still_  talking about his online porno thing?” Morgan asked, walking back towards his workspace.  
  
“What?!” Garcia and Reid shouted in unison.  
  
Morgan's smile around the edge of his coffee cup was just a little too smug.


End file.
